The Age of Freedom

Today, sugar production has reached staggering heights, far beyond the wildest dreams of the plantation Patrones, Planteurs, and Masters of the Spanish, French and British colonial empires. Over 100 million people work in sugar productions With 189.3 million metric tons of projected annual production in 2025, commercial sugar has hooked the entire planet into an unshakable addiction.

Now, instead of at the hands of human chattels, sugar is produced by free individuals who are free to choose degrading and strenuous working conditions or let their families starve while large employers monopolize their ancestral lands.

The Green Revolution increased sugarcane production 3.5 times from 1960 to 2018. This is staggering when the pre-existing scale of sugar manufacture is considered. Large plantations introduced new chemical fertilizers, irrigation methods and some mechanization to dramatically increase yields. However, despite the great increase in agricultural productivity, much of the concrete labor is still done manually and with shockingly crude methods. Millions of men, women, and children across the ‘developing’ world spend sweltering hours hacking sugarcane with machetes and then pressing it through large rollers to extract its juice.

While more and more sugarcane is harvested mechanically, especially in places where labor costs have increased, these methods lead to considerable crop damage and waste which manual harvesting avoids. If human labor is cheap enough, it makes far more financial sense to continue to consume as much of it as possible to maximize profits.

Because most states where sugarcane is harvested serve the interests of the plantation owning class rather than the common citizens, the reduction of manual labor in sugarcane harvesting therefore ends up meaning more land is required, which leads to the, often violent, displacement of small indigenous farmers from their lands in favor of large farming enterprises. It also means greater exploitation of natural resources like water and the use of even more fertilizers which leads to even greater ecological devastation. But these costs are not priced into the cheap sugar on our shelves. 

Today, the production of commodities like sugar, tropical fruits, coffee and so on is upheld by a limitless pool of violence. Companies like Nestlé, Coca Cola, Unilever and Mondelez rely on their dictator and death-squad partners to keep the commodities flowing. When a group of Central American Coca Cola workers gets uppity, there’s always a group of mercenaries, kept at a safe legal distance through intermediaries, ready to gun enough of them down to pacify the problem. 

Some efforts to create more ethical supply chains have taken place with movements like ‘Fair Trade’, but while these producers (usually) receive more than mere subsistence, the payment they get is still based on a systemic devaluation of the labor of workers outside rich countries. A fair trade cocoa farmer is not getting compensation remotely comparable to what a similar worker in a European or even East Asian country would receive.